Furman University International Internship Program in East and Southeast Asia

Furman University is pleased to announce the establishment of the International Internship Program in East and Southeast Asia. As part of The Furman Advantage, this program supports students who independently seek and obtain a full-time (eight week minimum) internship. To encourage students to participate, Furman has joined with the Freeman Foundation to provide up to $8,000 in funding for a limited number of students who complete their internships during the summer of 2019.

*International students may not seek internships in their country of origin.

Important Dates

Applications for the summer of 2019 are now closed. Information about next year’s application process will be posted in the fall. Please check back in the 2019-20 academic year.

About the

Freeman Foundation

A Massachusetts native, Mansfield Freeman graduated from Wesleyan University, served honorably in World War I, and studied at Edinburgh University before making the impetuous decision to join the staff at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1919. He taught English, philosophy, and Greek. That same year, Cornelius Vander Starr founded American Asiatic Underwriters in Shanghai. In 1925, Freeman and Starr met after Freeman’s students won a summer contest in Beijing. Starr invited the talented professor to Shanghai to join his company. Over the next half century, Starr and Freeman worked together to expand their business ventures across the globe, ultimately co-founding American International Group (AIG), the largest American company begun abroad.

Upon his retirement from AIG in 1978, Mansfield Freeman established the trust that would become the Freeman Foundation after his death in 1992. The goal of the foundation, Freeman wrote, was “to strengthen the bonds of friendship between this country and those of the Far East; to develop a greater appreciation of Oriental cultures in this country and a better understanding of American institutions in and purposes on the part of the peoples of East Asia, and to stimulate an exchange of ideas in economic and cultural fields which will help create mutual understanding and thus lessen the danger of such frictions and disagreements as lead to war.”

Mansfield’s son Houghton “Buck” Freeman and his wife, Doreen, served as co-trustees of the Freeman Foundation from 1993 until Buck's death in 2010. The couple carried out Mansfield’s vision by donating hundreds of millions of dollars to fund a series of philanthropic endeavors designed to foster increased understanding between the United States and East Asia. This included scholarships for Asian and American students to study abroad, support for Asian studies professors and students at 84 colleges and universities in the United States, numerous endowed professorships, and tens of millions in disaster relief and forest preservation. It also created funding for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, a program designed to infuse Asian-related content into middle and high schools, which includes the South Carolina Center for Teaching about Asia at Furman. Since 2010, Graeme Freeman has carried on the family philanthropic tradition by overseeing the foundation and launching the newest Freeman initiative, supporting students in the United States to engage in full-time internships in East or Southeast Asia. We would like to profoundly thank Mr. Freeman and the other trustees of the foundation for financially supporting The Furman Advantage: The Freeman Foundation International Internship Program in East and Southeast Asia.

Participant Profiles

Allison Powell, from Winter Park, Florida, is a spring 2017 graduate with a double major in Spanish and Chinese Studies and minor in Middle Eastern Studies who interned at the Thai Ecotourism and Adventure Travel Association in Bangkok. The experience was an opportunity, as Allie explains it, to “engage diverse communities of people and think about how I could incorporate that passion in the business world.” After her internship was completed, Powell entered the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University

Jade Pearce, from Memphis, Tennessee, is a sophomore double major in History and Political Science who did her summer internship at Ericsson Telecommunications in Singapore. Ericsson is a multinational information and communications technology company based in Stockholm with offices around the world. She worked in the Human Resources Department to compile and evaluate Ericsson talent acquisition and employee onboarding processes. The internship was essential, Pearce said, in helping her envision how to make “new business contacts” and how they “could help my career in the future."

Jason Hirsch, from Fort Mill, South Carolina, is a spring 2017 graduate with a degree in Health Sciences who traveled to the village of Gundu in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, to work at one of the health posts of the Nepal Reliance Organization, which provides low-cost healthcare to local residents. Living with a host family was, Jason confessed, “the most influential factor” in his positive internship experience.

“I arrived in Nepal without a clue as to what life would be like and departed knowing I will always have a home on the other side of the world,”

When not working at the National Development Agency, senior Owen Murphy found time to ride horses on the famous Mongolian steppe outside the capital of Ulaanbaatar. Murphy, a double major in History and Urban Studies from Kensington, Maryland, focused his internship on urban planning and local economic growth by contributing to the evolving Sustainable Development Vision, which included meeting with local officials, teleconferencing with stakeholders in Singapore, and researching successful sustainable development models from Kazakhstan, Malaysia, and Latvia. Murphy was proud of his accomplishments in the office but described living in Mongolia as “priceless.”

"The real internship for me was living in Ulaanbaatar and interacting with my Mongolian coworkers.”

Sunyeop Lee, a senior Health Science and Spanish double major, spent his summer interning at EnerGaia in Thailand. EnerGaia is a social enterprise that specializes in producing spirulina while prioritizing environmental and human sustainability. During his internship, Sun worked on EnerGaia's Kenya project, which is designed to help communities in northern Kenya solve problems of poverty and malnutrition by teaching local farmers how to utilize an innovative closed bioreactor system for spirulina production.

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